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The author fails to realize one critical thing—that the imaginary "Objective-C 3" language he wants requires intentionally breaking the fact that Objective-C is a strict superset of C… exactly what Swift has done.

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I think you misunderstand then. I think he's all for a new language, the problem with Swift is that it's not quite the language he hoped for.

"It’s the syntactic sugar that makes the syntax modern, not the feature set within Swift itself. A cleaner ObjC could have done the same thing."

I think this statement is false—a cleaner Objective-C could be nowhere near as clean as Swift!

You have heard of Smalltalk? Remove the square brackets, remove the C. Squeaky clean syntax. http://squeak.org/

And now you have room in your language to provide actual innovation. See http:/objective.st/ for a start of what that might look like.

Look at Eero for to how a simple updated syntax could look. On top of that, many of Swift's features could run on an updated ObjC as well. The problem is that the features that required a whole new runtime and compiler model are very few.

In other words, we could have gotten almost-Swift by building squarely on ObjC and would have avoided most of the runtime and performance issues that still plague the language. Plus it would have been a simpler language than Swift is.

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